Reacting to last night’s GOP presidential debate, the White House said today that the 2012 candidates proved themselves to be out of touch with Americans by saying they would refuse to accept tax increases as part of a debt deal. In Ames, Iowa last night the candidates were asked if they would refuse to accept a budget deal with a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. All eight presidential contenders raised their hands. “That’s clearly not where the American people are,” Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters today. “That basically puts these candidates in a position...

Ratings agency Moody's repeated a warning on Monday it could downgrade the United States before 2013 if the fiscal or economic outlook weakens significantly, but said it saw the potential for a new debt agreement in Washington to cut the budget deficit before then. With U.S. markets still to open after rival Standard & Poor's stripped the United States of its AAA rating late on Friday, Moody's said in a statement its own decision to affirm the AAA rating on August 2 was on the condition that further cuts were found. "For the Aaa rating to remain in place, we...

Military pay raises, funding for veterans health care and the Post-9/11 GI Bill could be sacrificed to new fiscal realities as the result of the deal signed by President Obama on Tuesday to raise the federal debt ceiling, according to the Military Officers Association and veterans groups. The law requires the federal budget be cut $2.1 trillion over 10 years. The White House said it plans to cut $350 billion from the Defense Department budget (excluding war funding) over the next decade. Retired Air Force Col. Michael Hayden, the association's deputy director for government relations, said this means "everything is...

The no's came from both sides of the aisle. Two Illinois Democrats and three Republicans voted the deal down. ... Jackson Jr. voted against the bill saying the cuts will do nothing to get Americans back to work. Evanston Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky says she couldn't vote for a bill that opens the door to entitlement cuts and does not include tax increases for the wealthy. "I really couldn't in the consciousness do this, which raises $1 trillion in spending cuts[?] of the middle class, the poor, seniors, while millionaires and billionaires are still not asked to pay a single penny,"...

I just love Washington-speak which offers heartfelt phrases such as “baseline spending,” “debt ceiling,” “drop dead dates,” and my ultimate favorites, “the cut,” “to cut,” “a cut,” or just simply “cuts.” Like the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” a “cut” means different things to different people. Let me explain by first discussing common-speak, which is very easy to understand. When someone takes a cut in pay, it could mean going from $20 per hour to $15 per hour. Or, they’re paid $30,000 per year for a job that used to pay $35,000 per year. To most...

For those of you that don't know what the baseline is and how baseline budgeting works, let me give you the real quick explanation of it. When you put together your budget, if you do one, you take last year's spending and income and you take a look at it and you figure out if you spent more than you had, or if you didn't spend more than you had, what did you do with what you had left over, where did it get spent. If the next budget you prepare has to be smaller because your income's dropped, you...

Eleven arrested after Capitol sit-in against budget cutsBy Debbie Siegelbaum - 07/28/11 02:04 PM ET U.S. Capitol Police arrested 11 Christian and Jewish faith leaders Thursday after they staged a Capitol sit-in against budget cuts. The group called on the Obama administration and Congress not to “balance the budget on the backs of the poor,” according to the release sent out after the incident. The religious leaders, members of an interfaith coalition to protect the poor, have been charged with demonstrating within a U.S. Capitol building, according to a Capitol Police spokeswoman. All have been taken to Capitol Police headquarters...

Johnson & Johnson said Thursday that it's reducing the maximum daily dose of its Extra Strength Tylenol pain reliever to lower risk of accidental overdose from acetaminophen, its active ingredient and the top cause of liver failure. The company's McNeil Consumer Healthcare Division said the change affects Extra Strength Tylenol sold in the U.S. -- one of many products in short supply in stores due to a string of recalls. Starting sometime this fall, labels on Extra Strength Tylenol packages will now list the maximum daily dose as six pills, or a total of 3,000 milligrams, down from eight pills...

Senate Democrats today unleashed a torrent of criticism against the GOP's Cut, Cap, and Balance Act which passed the House late last night via a heavily partisan vote, re-branding it as a political scheme that would "kill medicare" and one that would never pass in the Senate. "Let me make this as simple as I can: the Republican scheme to cap, cut, and kill medicare is dead on arrival in the senate," declared Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at a press conference in Washington. "[It] would wreak havoc on our country's seniors, the middle class, military preparedness, and our country's standing...

Indiana ends budget year with $1.2B surplus July 14, 2011, 6:47 pm EDT INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- After a year of spending cuts to state agencies and school districts, during which state workers were asked to do more than ever, Indiana released its final budget numbers for the fiscal year that showed it sitting on a $1.2 billion surplus. State Auditor Tim Berry called the state workers who bore most of those budget cuts via greater workloads, "heroes." "The surplus was built on the backs of state employees," said Berry, after he thanked them for tightening their belts. Republican Gov. Mitch...

Late last week, it looked like Tom Coburn might rejoin the Gang of Six in the Senate, which restarted their efforts to find a compromise on the budget as the debt-ceiling limit debate rages. Today, however, Coburn will become a Gang of One by releasing his own plan to reduce the deficit by twice the amount of the Paul Ryan plan. Unlike Ryan, Coburn plans on increasing federal revenues, but through reform of the tax code: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said Sunday the federal government can save $1 trillion though tax reform, a proposal that will put him at odds...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting House Republicans will vote next week to cut $2.4 trillion over the next ten years while increasing the debt ceiling by a $2.4 trillion. House Republicans said Friday that they planned to vote next week on a proposal to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion, with matching cuts and guidelines to control future government spending. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said at a news conference Friday that the House next week would vote on a "cut, cap and balance" approach. The House plans to separately vote on a measure that would...

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell challenged President Obama’s claim to support trillions in serious spending cuts as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling – cuts the president says show he’s ready to anger Democrats to get a deal. In a sharply worded speech on the Senate floor today, McConnell labeled the Obama cuts a sham. “We all saw how it worked,” he said. “The administration leaked to the media, without any details, the idea that it was willing to go along with trillions in spending cuts.”But the cuts are largely illusory, McConnell indicated. Obama hoped “the budget...

Politicians often rail against government spending, except when it goes to the military. Conservatives believe there is no such thing as too much defense spending, and liberals don't argue, for fear of being labeled appeasers. So when there is talk of the two parties agreeing to cut the Pentagon budget, it sounds like a monumental change. But probably not. It's a good thing that defense, which accounts for roughly a fifth of all federal outlays, is no longer considered immune to the need for frugality. But both supporters and opponents have a stake in portraying any trims as far more...

Washington (CNN) - President Barack Obama is seeking $3 trillion to $4 trillion in deficit cuts over the next decade, a move that would require putting Social Security, Medicare, defense spending and tax reform on the table as part of a balanced approach to cuts, Democratic officials familiar with the negotiations told CNN. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not say what types of cuts would have to be considered under such a proposal. In the past, one Social Security adjustment debt negotiators have discussed is cost-of-living.

Administration Offers Health Care Cuts as Part of Budget NegotiationsBy ROBERT PEAR Published: July 4, 2011 WASHINGTON — Obama administration officials are offering to cut tens of billions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid in negotiations to reduce the federal budget deficit, but the depth of the cuts depends on whether Republicans are willing to accept any increases in tax revenues. Administration officials and Republican negotiators say the money can be taken from health care providers like hospitals and nursing homes without directly imposing new costs on needy beneficiaries or radically restructuring either program. Before the talks led by Vice...

Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislative leaders announced today that they have reached an agreement on a new majority-vote budget plan. "We've had some tough discussions, but I can tell you that the Democrats in both the Senate and the Assembly have now joined with the administration and myself and we have a very good plan going forward with the budget," Brown said at a press conference in his office this afternoon. The proposal, outlined in this post, assumes that the state will bring in an additional $4 billion in revenues in the upcoming fiscal year, based in part on...

CHURCHVILLE, VA—My colleague Bennie Peiser, of Britain’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, offers some of his latest man-made global warming news: The Sunday Times noted on May 22 that the UK government has agreed to cut its greenhouse emissions 50 percent by 2027. As a result, “Tata Steel last week announced it was cutting 1,500 jobs at its Scunthorpe and Teeside plants. The company, which employs 21,000 in Britain, has held high-level talks with government in recent weeks over its energy plans. . . . Ineos founder Jim Ratcliffe warned that he could be forced to shut the firm’s Runcorn chlorine...

The big Sarah Palin news today is that she has lost her longtime foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. Scheunemann is a well-known neoconservative who worked for Jesse Helms and was intimately involved in the push for the Iraq war. He later became an aide to John McCain on the 2008 presidential campaign, where he met and linked up with Palin. He's been associated with her ever since. The question is: Why did they Scheunemann, who runs the lobbying firm Orion Strategies, leave Palin now?

The tea party is apparently not on the Medicare-Medicaid-cutting bandwagon, so reports The Atlantic Wire. In a recent McClatchy-Marist poll, 70 percent of ‘tea party supporters’ strongly opposed cutting the healthcare plan for the elderly and indigent, compared to about 80 percent of registered voters. This despite Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget which passed the House last week and phases out Medicare for those under 55.

I can't remember a more depressing week in Washington. The Republicans boasted a heroic accomplishment: slashing $38.5 billion from the budget, purportedly the largest cuts in history. But strip away the gimmicks and shine a light on the shadows, and it turns out the real cuts amounted to $352 million, or less than 1 percent of what was promised. America borrows $4 billion a day. So we likely borrowed more than we cut in the amount of time the GOP leadership spent bragging about its "victory." It is a dismal, dreary, mope-inducing performance that makes one wonder what the point...

There is a lot wrong with the current state of affairs in Illinois. That's nothing new. Hit hardest by budget cuts in recent years has been the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Those budget cuts have continued to a critical mass for IDNR's programs, facilities and sites, its staff and - most importantly - the Illinois Conservation Police...

The House on Friday approved a fiscal year 2012 budget resolution from Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that seeks to drastically limit government spending next year and in years to follow. But the vote on the measure — which imposes $5.8 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade — came after a clear sign that at least half of the Republican Caucus supports even tougher spending cuts. The final tally was 235-193, with four Republicans opposing it. Every Democrat voted "no."

(CBS/AP) Details of the $38 billion worth of spending cuts factoring in last Friday's 11th-hour budget that averted a government shutdown have been released, but the cuts, while historic, were significantly eased by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway. [Snip] Many of the cuts appear to have been cuts in name only, because they came from programs that had unspent funds. For example, $1.7 billion left over from the 2010 census; $3.5 billion in unused children's health insurance funds; $2.2 billion in subsidies for...

WASHINGTON – The historic $38 billion in budget cuts resulting from at-times hostile bargaining between Congress and the Obama White House were accomplished in large part by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway. Such moves permitted Obama to save favorite programs — Pell grants for poor college students, health research and "Race to the Top" aid for public schools, among others — from Republican knives, according to new details of the legislation released Tuesday morning. And big holes in foreign aid and Environmental Protection...

Barack Obama has belatedly discovered that Americans want to see reductions in government spending. How else to explain David Plouffeâ€™s appearance on a series of talk shows yesterday announcing that the President would unveil a new proposal this week to counter Paul Ryanâ€™s roadmap on entitlement reform? However, it seems as though Obama still hasnâ€™t figured out the scale of the problem: In an effort to go on the offensive in the battle over government spending, Obama will look for cuts in Â“all corners of government,Â” senior adviser David Plouffesaid on several Sunday talk shows.Although ObamaÂ’s health-care law is projected...

Limbaugh says GOP caved on budget deal By Daniel Strauss - 04/11/11 01:05 PM ET Rush Limbaugh said Monday that Republican leaders "caved" on the budget deal they struck with the White House on Friday night. On his radio show, the conservative firebrand said he was less than enthusiastic about the $38.5 billion federal spending compromise. Limbaugh said he wished the spending cuts had been larger. "We've shown that we'll cave. We have demonstrated that we will cave if they threaten something like government shutdown," Limbaugh said. He added that a handful of Tea Party Republican freshmen in the House...

Barack Obama will this week propose cuts in health care provision for the elderly and the poor as he seeks to reach agreement with Republicans on bringing America's record levels of debt under control. Aides said that in a major speech on Wednesday the US president will lay out plans that will include reform of Medicare and Medicaid, the major subsidised health care schemes that are among the main causes of the country's $14.25 trillion (Ł8.7 trillion) national debt. "The president will be laying out his approach to long-term deficit reduction," said David Plouffe, a senior adviser at the White...

Nurse leaders will warn this week that poor morale and job cuts threaten to derail the government's reform programme of the NHS in England. The issues, along with wider concerns about the overhaul, will be key themes of the Royal College of Nursing's annual conference in Liverpool. RCN leader Peter Carter has said nurses were being pushed to the limit, working extra hard to keep services going. The health secretary is not expected to give a speech but will meet delegates. It is understood Andrew Lansley is attending the conference as part of the government's "listening exercise" over its shake-up...

The House Republican Study Committee (RSC) on Thursday released an alternative to the 2012 budget resolution from Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that would cut $9.1 trillion in spending over the next decade. The RSC, a 176-member caucus, will offer its Â“Honest SolutionsÂ” plan as a floor amendment to the budget resolution next week. The House Budget Committee passed the GOP budget plan late Wednesday. Like a failed RSC effort in February to cut $40 billion more from 2011 spending, the amendment is expected to fail, but it sends a strong signal to GOP leadership and to Democrats that...

Republicans on Monday night introduced a measure to fund the military through September and government operations for one more week. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told his conference about the legislation — which contains $12 billion in spending cuts — during a Monday night meeting, his office said. The move is intended to prevent a government shutdown that would start after Friday unless Congress approves another measure to fund the government.

Tea Party Hero and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan to release Reaganesque plan tomorrow... BigFurHat Although this year's budget battle remains deadlocked with obstinate libs who didn't get the message last November -or are keen to see the Cloward-Piven strategy through to full fruition- it's sure heartening to see House Republicans -after some squishyness in the 2011 stalemate- not allowing an unwanted status quo to be forced upon us. The author of the bill -fiscal hawk Rep Paul Ryan (R-Wi)- will be presenting a comprehensive long-term plan for tackling the insane level of spending in this country on Tuesday... one that's also likely...

Wading directly into the spending negotiations on Capitol Hill for the first time in weeks, President Obama on Saturday afternoon called the top Republican and top Democrat in Congress, telling them he supports a deal cutting another $23 billion from last year’s spending levels. In calls to House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, Mr. Obama also said time is running short, according to a White House statement recounting the calls. Mr. Boehner, in Republicans’ weekly radio address Saturday, said there is no final spending agreement but added Republicans’ pressure has pushed...

Over at AoSHq, Ace puts up a short but good post about the budget battle between the GOP and Democrats (who paint every action by Republicans as either taking the food right out of little Suzie’s mouth or the prune juice out of Grandma’s cabinet). I especially sympathize with this: “…I am tired of the Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Manana, Manana non-plan plan for reducing spending. We cannot be told always that big changes are coming in the future. That’s how we got here — we just kept permitting these problems to grow worse as we talked always about future changes.” I’m...

Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church door. House Republican freshmen prefer blue painters' tape. A band of the first-term members of Congress demonstrated their legislative maturity Wednesday by announcing, in a news conference outside the Capitol, that they wished to deliver a message to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But rather than merely send him an email or hire a courier, the lawmakers instead marched up the East Front steps and presented themselves at a seldom-used ceremonial door. Being a ceremonial door, it was locked — so the freshmen used two strips of their blue tape to...

Washington (CNSNews.com) – House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said that conservative Republicans who oppose anything less than the significant budget cuts they promised their constituents were acting like “dictators” and were to blame for stalled budget negotiations. Harkening back to the government shutdown of 1996, Hoyer blamed what he called the “perfectionist caucus” for refusing to compromise, then and now. “The last time government shut down President Clinton was President of the United States,” Hoyer told reporters at his weekly media briefing. “And what happened then was the perfectionist caucus thought they would be the dictators and do it...

Fast to begin Monday to protest proposed GOP budget cutsBy Erik Wasson - 03/27/11 06:45 AM ET The heads of five anti-hunger organizations on Monday will lead open-ended fasts to protest proposed cuts to domestic and international food programs contained in the House-passed six month spending bill. Former Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio), the head of the Alliance to End Hunger, told The Hill Friday that Democrats are not doing enough to ensure the cuts do not become law, and he is fasting to give a “voice to the voiceless.” He will be joined in his water-only fast by Rev. David...

WASHINGTON - The Washington Post is reporting that the U.S. Postal Service is expected to detail how it plans to cut about 7,500 administrative positions. Postal officials previously announced plans to cut the 7,500 positions in January, and Thursday's announcement clarifies which positions are impacted. The job cuts are expected to impact about 2,000 postmasters. Cutting postmasters is especially noteworthy, because it will likely prompt USPS to close the post offices they operate. Though 7,500 seems like an impressive figure, remember the Postal Service still has about 520,000 full-time workers; another 234,000 employees left in the last decade on their...

~ EXCERPT ~ (03-24) 14:11 PDT Sacramento -- Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law billions of dollars worth of cuts to state services today, but acknowledged that state leaders still have to find more than $12 billion in cuts or revenues to close the state's budget gap. Despite an impasse between Democrats and Republican lawmakers over the budget that has become more clear in recent days, Brown said he is still hopeful that some GOP legislators - he needs two in the Senate and two in the Assembly - will "give the people the right to vote" in June...

While the national spotlight has been on Wisconsin’s efforts to downsize state government and get structural deficits under control, Ohio also has been moving to rationalize its state government in an era of high unemployment and static state revenue. The Buckeye State will soon consider the budget proposals of newly elected Republican Gov. John Kasich, which would close Ohio’s $8 billion, two-year budget deficit by, among other things, reducing payments to localities, restructuring Medicaid and selling five state prisons. As in similar reform efforts in Wisconsin, Florida, Indiana and other states with Republican governors, no tax increases are proposed. Earlier,...

The anti-government “throw-the-bums-out” crowds have had their chance to speak out on how to curtail the deficit and what to do with those hated entitlements that are the antithesis of the America they pine for. A recent WSJ/NBC News poll provided a glimpse of just how dependent on big government entitlements Americans have become–even among the Tea Party. Not that this should be a surprise to anyone watching the slow shift of the American mindset from citizen, to consumer, to ward of the State over the past century. According to the Wall Street Journal who co-sponsored the poll, “Americans across...

It is enough to make a grown man weep to see how tepid the House Republicans are under Speaker John Boehner. It isn't just that their pathetic excuse for federal budget cuts betrays the 2010 electoral mandate of the American people, which it does. It is that their tepid response to the massively destructive federal budget signals to the American people that the Republican Party still cannot be trusted with the reins of government. We live in a time of crisis, and the people are seeking substantive solutions to life-threatening problems. That means they want the politicians to stop their...

WASHINGTON » A spending plan approved by the House would slash funding for a tsunami warning center that issued an alarm after the devastating earthquake in Japan. The plan approved by the GOP-controlled House last month would trigger deep cuts for the National Weather Service, including the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. A union representing workers at the tsunami center said the proposed cuts could result in furloughs and rolling closures of National Weather Service offices. Barry Hirshorn, Pacific region chairman of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said the GOP bill would affect the center's ability to issue...

CBO: Democrats’ “$6.5 Billion” in Spending Cuts Actually $4.7 BillionMarch 08, 2011 5:47 PM Jake Tapper and Matthew Jaffe report: The Congressional Budget Office this week said that the Senate Democrats’ bill offers $4.7 billion in spending cuts -- not the $6.5 billion that President Obama and congressional Democrats said. After last week’s meeting on Capitol Hill among congressional leaders and Vice President Biden, Senate Democrats wrote legislation and gave it to CBO to be analyzed. CBO put the cuts at $4.7 billion. The bottom line: Democrats and Republicans are roughly $52 billion apart in the cuts they want to...

With major budget votes set for Tuesday, Senate Democrats spent the weekend dismissing House Republicans' plans to cut the budget as “ideological, extremist, reckless." President Obama advocated “a government that lives within its means,” but he also charged “there’s nothing responsible about the Republican budget cuts. Following the same script, news headlines described the House Republicans cuts as "dramatic" and "outrageous." The magnitude of this year’s deficit might be hard for many to appreciate. But the monthly budget deficit for February of $223 billion is larger than the $160.7 billion deficit for all of 2007, the last time we had...

The Washington Times reports that the federal deficit for February 2011, was approximately $223 billion. No I didn't write 2.23 billion dollars. It is $223 billion; a record for one month. Here is some context: "•Dividing the $223 billion in the 28 days of February amounts to $7.9 billion in new debt per day. •Republicans are trying to cut spending by $60 billion for the remaining seven months of the current budget year. This is $8.57 billion in cuts per each month. No, not per day. $8.57 per month. •The $4 billion in "cuts" that Republicans won last week, is...

"The fact is that Democrats stand ready to meet the Republicans halfway on this. That would be fair." -- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), March 3, 2011 "We are also prepared to put out specifics that will move another over $6 billion closer -- so that we will have met them halfway -- essentially split the difference between the president's request and [the GOP cuts in] H.R. 1." -- Gene B. Sperling, director of the White House National Economic Council, March 3, 2011 "We have met them halfway, which in many ways is a perfect definition of an attempt...

A Washington, D.C., think tank is recommending that Tricare fees drastically increase and that the Pentagon implement means-testing for still-working retirees to bring costs of the DoD-run system under control. Health care accounts for nearly 10 percent of the Pentagon's $550 billion budget, and a study released by the Center for American Progress suggests that it is only a matter of time before those costs start diverting funds away from the military's national security missions. "If the defense budget stays flat and these costs increase, it's going to hurt military readiness," said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official in the...